One minute, she sat at a row of desks checking the work of two of her third-graders as they practiced counting fake coins. The next, she wedged herself under a table to sit with a boy struggling to measure the perimeter of shapes. Another group took a “divide and conquer” approach to their task — one student lined up paper clips on the cardboard shapes while another wrote down the answers.

What she wasn’t doing much was standing in front of the class teaching all her students in her Key Learning Community Schoolthird grade class the same thing at once.

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Nissenbaum’s not alone. Fewer lectures is one way Indianapolis Public Schools’ teachers are adapting to the state’s new academic standards, which went into effect in July after Indiana’s quick about-face and rejection of Common Core standards earlier this year.

Grouping students by ability level is intended to help them focus on the skills they need to master and can be especially helpful to those who are well ahead of their classmates, or far behind, Nissenbaum, 32, said.

“As much as possible, I do group work,” she said. “That really meets individual needs.”

She cited an English standard in reading — which asks that students be proficient at finding the main idea of a passage — as a hypothetical example of how lecture doesn’t work for some kids, particularly those who have already grasped the concept.

“Frankie doesn’t need to hear about themain idea, so why am I spending my time and resources on him to continue speaking about it when someone else in the class doesn’t understand it yet?” Nissenbaum said.

Indiana’s new academic standards are a set of expectations for what students should learn at each grade. The new ones the state adopted in April aim to require teachers to be more attentive than ever to exactly what each student does and doesn’t know.

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But teachers are still dealing with the same limited time and resources. Doing more group work, and more detailed tracking of what students learn, is one way the district is attempting to manage those new demands, which also include newly redesigned ISTEP tests come spring.

Tammy Bowman, the IPS’ head curriculum officer, said staff training that started in September focused on those areas — helping teachers get away from lecture and having them make sure students master the content and skills in every new standard before moving on to other topics.

“I used to tell my students that ‘kid language’ can be so much more powerful than me sometimes, because you know what that other student needs to hear because you think just like them,” Bowman said.

More group work and emphasizing mastery are considered best practice for teachers, she said, but the district focused on them intentionally to support teachers in the transition to new standards and help align with the new administration’s goals for IPS.

“We feel pretty good about the buy-in,” Bowman said. “Because for some people, these are major changes in philosophy and thinking … I think we are making really good progress.”

New standards, new strategies

Common Core is a set of new learning standards that Indiana, like 45 other states and the District of Columbia, agreed to follow with a goal of boosting students’ academic skills. Indiana was an early adopter of Common Core in 2010.

Then-Gov. Mitch Mitch Daniels and then-state Superintendent Tony Bennett both backed Common Core and the standards were instituted with little fanfare. But once President Obama and the U.S. Department of Education began encouraging states to follow Common Core, parents and legislators began to question if they made sense for every state.

Indiana critics argued the state should just write its own standards, as it had been doing before Common Core entered the picture. After a bill ordered just that earlier this year, by voiding Indiana’s Common Core adoption, new Gov. Mike Pence and new state Superintendent Glenda Ritz jointly endorsed standards produced in February by panels of educators and experts.

But the new Indiana-specific standards didn’t satisfy everyone. Critics who argued against Common Core said they were too similar to Common Core. Those who wanted to keep Common Core said the new standards took out some of the elements that they believed would help make Common Core effective, like specific guidance to help teachers interpret them.

Others complained the standards were adopted too late, giving teachers and schools just a few months to get ready to teach them to students. With ISTEP tests also being rewritten to reflect the new standards, teachers have to create new lessons without knowing what those tests will look like.

For the Key school, the change disrupted a methodical system of planning lessons, where the school’s tests are written based on standards, with daily lessons and activities created after the tests are made. But Nissenbaum said working at the school and learning ways to become more efficient and organized have made her a “1,000 percent better teacher.”

Adapting to a new reality

Nissenbaum spent her time after college moving around to schools in Pennsylvania and New York before accepting a temporary position at IPS School 44. Key, which serves grades K to 12, was overhauled three years ago after years of struggles. Its high school, for example, had earned D and F grades for low test scores for more than half a decade. Nissenbaum interviewed for a job with new Principal Sheila Dollaske in 2011. She was excited by Dollaske’s vision for the school.

“It just sounded like a different environment for students,” Nissenbaum said. “And I was like, ‘I want to be a part of that, so let’s see,’ and that was it. I fell in love with it.”

Like others at the school, Nissenbaum keeps meticulous data on her students’ achievement and what standards they have mastered so she knows exactly how to plan her lessons and instruction for each unit. It also gives teachers a chance to catch students before they fall too far behind, Bowman said, since they know along the way what areas might be more challenging to each child.

“Yes, it’s a lot more work,” Nissenbaum said, “Especially the way we do it. But the payoff is bigger. If it’s done right, I can tell you which of my kids understands each of these standards, and to what degree and how to help them.”

As principal, Dollaske thinks of herself as one of those assembly-line machines that dispenses candy into packages in exact amounts: She tries to give everyone enough information to do their jobs, but not so much that they are overloaded. With a barrage of presentations, guidelines and ISTEP materials coming from the Indiana Department of Education every few weeks, that can be a struggle.

But Dollaske came to Key for that sort of challenge. After training principals in Chicago, she was enticed to Key by the challenge of trying to make the schools’ famous curriculum — based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences — succeed in the state’s accountability system. This is her third year, but next year could be the end for Key. The school board are considering the possibility of closing the school and discontinuing its first-of-a-kind program in 2016.

Dollaske and her staff are trying to stay focused on helping students achieve, including passing ISTEP. Recently released sample questions for the new ISTEP have helped, she said.

“We tend to not sit back and wait,” Dollaske said. “And so now that we have an idea of what anchor assessment items look like, we’re breaking those down and seeing what the standards look like in action … standards are really hard to teach without knowing what the test will look like.”

Much of her frustration is in the lack of specifics: New practice tests are for combined grades 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8. How do teachers know which problems are for which grades, she asked? Why are the directions for some problems split up and put in different fonts?

“This is a disastrous pile of stuff on this page for you,” she said. “I look at this, and I don’t even know where to start, and I’m a good reader.”

Before they can focus on content, Dollaske said, they need to help kids learn computer skills they may not have.

It’s as if, she said, “I went in to take my drivers test and all of a sudden they asked me to say how I’d drive on a motorcycle. I’d still know the rules, the laws, but I haven’t done it on a motorcycle. That’s how we are going to try to approach the technology side.”

Keeping kids from falling behind

When School 61 second grade teacher Natalie Merz announced to her class that they’d be doing a “scoot” activity during math, one kid jumped to his feet, pumping his fist with joy.

“Take a few minutes at each problem and scoot to the next one,” Merz explained to her charges.

Because her kids don’t take ISTEP, Merz would seem to be free from some pressures of preparing them for standardized exams. But she’s already thinking about the tests her students will take next year.

By third grade, her students will be expected to be proficient readers, but teachers can’t always expect that all their students are performing at grade level. She has to know what each kids needs to learn to be ready for next year and let them work at their own paces to meet that standard.

So her children often tackle tasks with varying degrees of difficulty, such as the “scoot” activity.

“Teaching is just literally, what does this kid need?” said Merz. “It’s finding 26 different ways to do something.”

On a recent morning, her class was practicing double-digit addition and subtraction. The kids sat cross-legged on the floor or sprawled out alongside bookshelves as they grabbed the cards got to work on math problems printed on the front side.

“Remember, in third grade we’ve got to show our work,” Merz said.

This is Merz’s second year with this class and her first year teaching second grade. She previously taught first grade and began her career as a Teach for America fellow in 2009. She’s been active with Teach Plus, a national a national group that aims to get teachers involved in advocacy and policy work. She’s known she wanted to be a teacher since middle school.

“I kind of got into what felt natural,” she said. “By the time I went to college, I just loved it.”

Even in her short career, she’s seen a lot of changes. Indiana is now on its third set of academic standards in her five years in the classroom. Perhaps that’s why Merz feels like it gets easier to adapt to the new standards each day. She’s optimistic next year, it will be even smoother.

That is, as long as the standards don’t change again.

“The big thing is I’m glad we’ve finally picked something,” Merz said. “We just want to teach kids what they need to learn and get them ready for life, not just the test.”

Indiana’s plan to measure high schools with a college prep test is on hold for two years

Thanks to last-minute legislative wrangling, it’s unclear what test Indiana high schoolers will take for the next two years to measure what they have learned in school.

Lawmakers were expected to approve a House bill proposing Indiana use a college entrance exam starting in 2019 as yearly testing for high schoolers, at the same time state works to replace its overall testing system, ISTEP. But the start date for using the SAT or ACT was pushed back from 2019 to 2021, meaning it’s unclear how high schoolers will be judged for the next two years.

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“Our next steps are to work with (the state board) to help inform them as they decide the plan for the next several years,” said Adam Baker, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education. “We take concerns seriously and we will continue doing all we can to support schools to manage the transition well.”

It’s just the latest road bump since the legislature voted last year to scrap ISTEP and replace it with ILEARN, a plan that originally included a computer-adaptive test for grades 3-8 and end-of-course exams for high-schoolers in English, algebra and biology. Indiana is required by the federal government to test students each year in English and math, and periodically, in science.

The Indiana Department of Education started carrying out the plan to move to ILEARN over the summer and eventually selected the American Institutes for Research to write the test, a company that helped create the Common-Core affiliated Smarter balanced test. AIR’s proposal said they were prepared to create tests for elementary, middle and high school students.

Then, the “graduation pathways” committee, which includes Behning and Sen. Dennis Kruse, the Senate Education Committee chairman, upended the plan by suggesting the state instead use the SAT or ACT to test high schoolers. The committee said the change would result in a yearly test that has more value to students and is something they can use if they plan to attend college. Under their proposal, the change would have come during the 2021-22 school year.

When lawmakers began the 2018 session, they proposed House Bill 1426, which had a 2019 start. This bill passed out of both chambers and the timeline was unchanged until Wednesday.

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In the meantime, the Indiana Department of Education and the Indiana State Board of Education must decide what test high schoolers will take in 2019 and 2020 and how the state as a whole will transition from an Indiana-specific 10th grade ISTEP exam to a college entrance exam.

It’s not clear what approach state education officials will take, but one option is to go forward with AIR’s plan to create high school end-of-course exams. The state will already need a U.S. Government exam, which lawmakers made an option for districts last year, and likely will need one for science because college entrance exams include little to no science content. It could make sense to move ahead with English and math as well, though it will ultimately be up to the state board.

Some educators and national education advocates have raised concerns about whether an exam like the SAT or ACT is appropriate for measuring schools, though 14 states already do.

Jeff Butts, superintendent of Wayne Township, told state board members last week that using the college entrance exams seemed to contradict the state’s focus on students who go straight into the workforce and don’t plan to attend college. And a report from Achieve, a national nonprofit that helps states work on academic standards and tests, cautioned states against using the exams for state accountability because they weren’t designed to measure how well students have mastered state standards.

“The danger in using admissions tests as accountability tests for high school is that many high school teachers will be driven to devote scarce course time to middle school topics, water down the high school content they are supposed to teach in mathematics, or too narrowly focus on a limited range of skills in (English),” the report stated.

State Rep. Jon Becker pitched the idea as basic good governance. The state auditor’s office examines all sorts of state programs, but it never looks at education, the second largest expenditure in Colorado’s budget and a sector that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. So let the auditor take a good, long look and report back to the legislature on which programs are working and which aren’t.

The State Board of Education hated this idea. So did Democrats. And Republicans. The House Education Committee voted 12-0 this week to reject Becker’s bill, which would have required a systematic review of all educational programs enacted by the legislature and in place for at least six years. Even an amendment that would have put the state board in the driver’s seat couldn’t save it.

As he made his case, Becker, a Republican from Fort Morgan in northeastern Colorado, was careful not to name any specific law he would like to see changed.

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“I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, he’s coming after my ox,’” he told the House Education Committee this week. “I know how this works. And that’s not the intent of this bill. It’s to look at all programs.”

But members of the committee weren’t buying it.

State Rep. Alec Garnett, a Denver Democrat, pressed school board members who testified in favor of the bill to name a law or program they were particularly excited to “shed some light on.” If there’s a law that’s a problem, he asked, wouldn’t it make more sense to drill down just on that law?

They tried to demur.

“I feel like you’re trying to get us to say, we really want you to go after 191 or we really want you to go after charter schools,” said Cathy Kipp, a school board member in the Poudre School District who also serves on the board of the Colorado Association of School Boards. “That’s not what this is about.”

Kipp said committee members seemed to be “scared that if their pet programs get looked at, they’ll be eliminated. Why be scared? Shouldn’t we want these programs to be looked at?”

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As Carrie Warren-Gully, president of the school boards association, argued for the benefits of an independent evaluation of education programs, she offered up an example: The schedules of administrators who have to evaluate dozens of teachers under the law are more complicated than “a flight plan at DIA,” and districts have to hire additional administrators just to manage evaluations, cutting into the resources available for students, she said.

The debate reflected ongoing tensions between the state and school districts over Colorado’s complex system for evaluating schools and teachers and holding them accountable for student achievement. The systematic review bill was supported by the Colorado Association of School Boards, the Colorado Association of School Executives, and the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance.

Lawmakers repeatedly told school officials that if they have problems with particular parts of existing legislation, they should come to them for help and will surely find allies.

Exasperated school officials responded by pointing to the past failure of legislation that would have tweaked aspects of evaluations or assessments — but the frustration was mutual.

“Just because people don’t agree with one specific approach doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to come to the table,” said committee chair Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat.

There were other concerns, including the possibility that this type of expansive evaluation would prove expensive and create yet another bureaucracy.

“When have we ever grown government to shrink it?” asked state Rep. Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican. “There’s a paradox here.”

And state Rep. James Wilson, a Salida Republican who is also a former teacher and school superintendent, questioned whether the auditor’s office has the expertise to review education programs. He also asked what standard would be applied to evaluate programs that are implemented differently in more than 170 school districts across the state.

“If it’s effective more often than not, will they keep it?” Wilson asked. “If it doesn’t work in a third of them, it’s gone?”

State Board of Education members had similar questions when they decided earlier this year that this bill was a bad idea. Many of Colorado’s education laws don’t have clear measures of success against which their performance can be evaluated.

The READ Act, for example, stresses the importance of every child learning to read well in early elementary school and outlines the steps that schools have to take to measure reading ability and provide interventions to help students who are falling behind their peers.

But how many children need to improve their reading and by how much for the READ Act to be deemed effective or efficient? That’s not outlined in the legislation.

Proponents of the bill said outside evaluators could identify best practices and spread them to other districts, but state board members said they already monitor all of these programs on an ongoing basis and already produce thousands of pages of reports on each of these programs that go to the legislature every year. In short, they say they’re on the case.

“The state board, I can assure you, are very devoted and intent to make sure that we follow, monitor, and watch the progress of any programs that go through our department and make sure they’re enacted in the best way possible within the schools,” board member Jane Goff said.